Most Recent

Reaching Out
Science /
Education and OutreachThursday December 04, 2014
Memphis is a long way from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, but Alex Eilers has brought thousands of students, teachers and others along on an expedition to study Weddell seals.

Exchange Program
Science /
Education and OutreachThursday May 29, 2014
The Joint Antarctic School Expedition, a pilot collaboration of the national Antarctic programs of Chile and the United States, brought high school students and teachers to Punta Arenas, Chile, in February 2014.

Quick Find

Search titles and article summaries by keyword or find articles by date.

More Results

Networking
Antarctica is not as remote as it once was. Planes reduce travel time to just a few hours. It's possible to exchange instant messages between McMurdo Station and New York City. Big experiments stream gigabytes of data. But computer power in the polar regions still lags. The NSF is working to change that.

Cyberinfrastructure
Marco Tedesco was recently appointed the Polar Cyberinfrastructure Program director at the National Science Foundation's Division of Polar Programs. In an interview, Tedesco talks about the potential benefits of cyberinfrastructure to the U.S. Antarctic Program.

Lost Antarctica
James McClintock, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and National Science Foundation-funded researcher, has distilled 30 years of research and experiences in Antarctica into a new book, Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land.

Changing with the Times
It's been 26 years since the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) had held one of its biannual meetings in the United States before July's gathering of about 900 scientists, national program managers, students and others in Portland, Ore. It was long overdue, according to outgoing SCAR President Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt II.

Growing Pressure
Antarctica faces an uncertain future amidst growing pressures from global climate change and human activities - a major conservation challenge that will require a commitment from scientists, policymakers and others with interests in protecting the environmental and scientific values of the southernmost continent.

Getting Started
The International Polar Year resulted in astounding discoveries and built new observation networks in the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. But perhaps one its most enduring legacies won't be found in a journal or dataset: The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists has grown into a major force in cyrospheric research.

Legacies and Lessons
Three years after its official end, the groundbreaking discoveries of the International Polar Year have been collected in a new report sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The consensus: The historic scientific collaboration between nations was a smashing success.

Eye on the Future
Remote observatories generating gigabytes of data on the weather from Antarctica's vast ice sheets. An array of buoys and gliders bobbing and cruising through the Southern Ocean. Satellites using ever more powerful sensors to peer through disintegrating ice shelves. It's a possible vision of the future offered by a committee of scientists and experts tasked with identifying and summarizing priorities in the Antarctic.

Hope for Education
Lesley Urasky went to Antarctica to teach her students at Rawlins High School in Wyoming something about polar science and the history of the continent's vast ice sheets. But perhaps the biggest lesson she imparted from her month-long adventure with a team of scientists in the central Transantarctic Mountains is never give up on a goal.

Race to the End
It was one of the great rivalries of the 20th century, a sort of heavyweight matchup of the day's great polar explorers: Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott. The Race to the South Pole is now a major exhibit at New York's American Museum of Natural History.

It's Just Physics
"It's just physics." That's the mantra coming from Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State and one of the world's leading experts in paleoclimatology and climate change, in a discussion about global warming.

Winter of Discontent
It hasn't been a good year for climate scientists. It started in November 2009 with the illegal release of thousands of e-mails and other documents from that climate-change critics seized upon as proof that global warming was a conspiracy. For researchers involved in the U.S. Antarctic Program, the recent backlash against science can be summed up in one word: frustrating.